No longer do business leaders need to spend decades building the next big thing to join the ranks of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at the top of the billionaires club; they just need to build an AI company.
There are now some 498 AI unicorns, or private AI companies, valued at $1 billion or more, with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, according to CB Insights.
A complete 100 of them were founded since 2023. There are more than 1,300 AI startups with valuations of over $100 million.
Take Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, for example. Her startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has just closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation.
We’ve not seen a tech boom like this since the late 90s and early 2000s, which propelled many of the tech giants of today, from eBay to Google, into the mainstream. While the dot-com boom can’t be directly compared because the “unicorn” label didn’t exist then and billion-dollar private valuations weren’t tracked, AI is creating billionaires at a record pace—and could even ring in an era of trillionaires.
